This morning while engaging in my daily self harm ritual known as “scrolling through Twitter,” I came across a tweet from one of the creators of A League of Their Own (the Amazon series, not the movie, don’t ask for my opinion of the show because I was… not in love with it):
Worth pondering: Why are the people panicking about the increase gender non-confirming people unconcerned about the tripling of people who identify as bi? Could both be because we made it slightly less hard for queer people to exist?
So firstly, yes: people all across the LGBTQ++++++++ spectrum are more likely to openly ID as whatever they ID as — are more likely to even understand themselves in these specific terms — because of increased visibility and decreased stigma. Yes. That is true.
But (and also let’s acknowledge that the tweet is phrased weirdly and that the second question seems to be intended as an answer to the first question but also clearly isn’t) there’s an implication built into the tweet that the lack of hysteria around the increasing numbers of bisexuals compared to the endless think pieces around trans youth is a sign that things are chill and dandy for (cis) bisexuals and cis queers more broadly, that the lack of New York Times editorials about terrifying spread of bisexuality is a sign that everyone is chill with the (cis) bis.
Friends, if only.
I mean, first off, I should note that the idea that there’s no hysteria around increasing numbers of bi-identified youth is, uh, not actually based in fact. If you google “more teens are identifying as bi,” one of the top results (it was number two for me, YMMV) is this page from an organization called The Gospel Coalition, which not only identifies bisexuality as a “social contagion,” but also directly connects its increasing numbers to trans people in a roundabout (and honestly bizarre) way:
One of the reasons bisexuality is considered necessary is that it is now considered “transphobic” to not be sexually attracted to someone who has the same genitalia as you. In other words, if you’re a man who refuses to date a trans woman (i.e., a man) or a woman who refuses to date a trans man (i.e., a woman) you will be called transphobic. (Ironically, this nullifies the L and G in LGBT, since gay men and lesbian women who refuse to date someone who has genitalia of the opposite sex are also considered transphobic.) For many young Americans, even if you aren’t attracted to the same sex and have no desire to enter into a same-sex relationship, it is still better to identify as “bisexual” to avoid being considered a bigot.
I’m honestly not sure how they think this works, especially given how often bisexuals are accused of upholding the gender binary (please no comments on what the “bi” in bisexual means to you, I truly don’t care, “bisexual” doesn't have to be taken literally, no one is demanding that lesbians hail from the Isle of Lesbos). But the point still stands that the people who are the angriest about rising numbers of trans folk aren’t actually thrilled about, or even neutral towards, the rising number of bisexuals.
But maybe that’s not who we’re talking about here. Because yes, it is true that in mainstream liberal circles, at least, the news of increasing numbers of teen bisexuals is largely being met with a shrug. And possibly that’s because everyone is cool with the bisexuals now, that the broader acceptance of queer sexuality includes us too. But it seems far more likely that the general silence around increasing numbers of bi-identified kids is due to the fact that, uh, people don’t actually believe them.
Like, honestly? I think when most people see those numbers, what they’re imagining is just a horde of white cis teen girls who want to be seen as cool and have decided that slapping a bi pride patch on their backpack is the quickest way to do that. I think they’re imagining a group of earnest young women who will, in time, regress to the norm of domestic heterosexuality and thus do not need to be taken seriously, a group of young women whose assertion of identity need only be met with a “that’s nice dear” and a pat on the head.
I think an uptick in youth bisexuality is not seen as threatening because it is functionally assumed to not matter, to not amount to anything beyond some youthful sexploits — a college BUG phase, if you will — before a reversion to being a nice straight married lady. That’s very different from how people perceive youthful gender non-conformity, which is repeatedly positioned as getting on the freeway to hormones, surgery, and (if you believe a bunch of pundits) inevitable regret. Notably, Jesse “Just Asking Questions” Singal — who positions himself as totally fine with trans people just, you know, worried about teens being “forced” into gender confirmation surgery" — defended the recent Times piece raising panic around schools allowing teens to socially transition without requiring parental notification by suggesting that social transition is a slippery slope to medical transition. (I don’t hate myself enough to sift through Singal’s tweets to find the exact take, sorry.)*
In the popular imagination, gender non-conformity can never be experimentation or a journey of self-discovery or anything beyond a rapid escalation to medical procedures, despite ample evidence that there are people who transition socially but not medically, or flirt with trans identity only to decide they’re actually cis, or have their own complex and unexpected gender journey that doesn’t look like any of the mainstream narratives. That’s why it is a readymade basis for panic. Conversely, bisexuality can never be anything other than experimentation, despite ample evidence of life long bisexuality among self-identified bisexuals. The relative silence around the uptick in bisexual youth isn’t some automatic sign of tolerance. It is, I’d argue, more of a dismissal.
(Is this where I remind you that it was less than a decade ago that The New York Times was publishing pieces about the scientific quest to “prove” that bisexuality exists? More recent coverage, like this 2021 piece on bi mental health, has been better, but generally speaking bisexuality as a topic is largely absent from the pages of The New York Times and other publications, which… kinda bolsters my point.)
I think it’s worth considering what it might look like if we actually took bisexuality seriously — which would, of course, have to start with the recognition that “more teens are identifying as bisexual” means something larger than “a bunch of bored white girls in the suburbs want to be edgy.” What if we actually contended with the possibility of — gasp! — bisexual boys and non-binary teens, of bisexual teens of color? What if we considered the possibility that more bisexual Gen Zers means more Gen Z men who are kind of fruity even as they’re also attracted to women, that bisexuality will necessarily lead folks to a path of, if not outright gender fluidity or non-conformity, at least a journey of figuring out how partnering with a man or a woman or a non-binary person affects their sense of their own gender identity? What if we considered that — even as bisexuality is not the same as non-monogamy — an uptick in self-identified bisexuals very likely means an uptick in Gen Zers flirting with non-traditional and, yes, non-monogamous relationship structures?
Do you actually think that if people had to contend with bisexuality in its full complexity, with all the gender bending and unpredictability and, yes, multi-partner configurations that it inevitably implies, that they’d actually be cool with more teens identifying as bi?
Because honestly, I do not. And there is a part of me that worries that once people are forced to contend with the reality of what more bisexuals truly means, with the threat bisexuality really does pose to the established heteronormative order, that they won’t actually be so chill.
But hey, who knows. Maybe we’ll solve biphobia before that day ever comes.
* Probably worth a mention here that before his obsession with trans youth Singal was obsessed with heteroromantic bisexual men
I think it’s also about visibility because what does bisexual look like? gender non-conformity is often visible and can be registered as such. but bisexuality doesn’t look like anything, and that is why it is so easy to ignore and erase as either heterosexuality/homosexuality.
When these same stats came out a 6-9 months ago there was a lot of discourse about the bi numbers from the cishet liberal men in my feed, and the conclusion of many was that young women are lying about their sexuality to be trendy- hardly a cascade of bi acceptance. "Nobody is talking about X" is usually just a reveal of your own filter bubble and biases most of the time.